Hi Dave,
Patreon -> Paypal -> buy stuff direct or pay for services direct with paypal. ;)
I already do, but that's mostly for software or services. Here in Colombia there is pretty much nobody that accepts Paypal. Likewise the local payment providers of similar make an model as Paypal don't accept foreign bank accounts or foreign credit cards as source of funding. All in all: The local money laundering regulations make any transfer into and out of the country a real chore with lots of red tape.
For someone doing what you do, having a fairly reliable residual income is really nice to depend upon. I don't know if your business is a full on business or a hobby business, but a lot of hobby businesses do a lot better when they have a patreon.
Solarspeed.net has been a fulltime business since 2002 and the four years before that I was part-timing it. A good chunk of my steady income is from regular support/maintenance contracts where I look after peoples servers or provide a certain number of work hours a month to perform on-call jobs or specialized tasks. As far as the BlueOnyx shop goes? It has it's seasonal ups and downs and that has pretty much always been the case.
But yeah: I might give the Patreon approach some further thoughts. Many thanks for bringing that up!
Either way, as a long time user since the pre-Sun days (I have dozens of Raq3/4/4i) it's nice to have them all switched off and be using a CM4 Pi board with PCIe SSD in a Raq 4i case. I just want to work out a way to make it run the original buttons and display and I'd release the hardware (I do PCB design for a living)
Oooh, that sounds very intersting. Nice job giving these old severs a new breath of life!
-- With best regards Michael Stauber _______________________________________________ Blueonyx mailing list Blueonyx@mail.blueonyx.it http://mail.blueonyx.it/mailman/listinfo/blueonyx
